Sticky Café
by Bhangra Santa
Summary: Sirius sits in a café and thinks about Remus. Slash if you squint quite hard.


**Disclaimer: Not mine, never will be**

**Dedication: To Stiss, who's never had a fic dedicated to her before and who can be a right secretive bugger when she wants to be.**

Sucking on a straw drinking Cola in a café, Sirius has a dreadful 'Oh Shit' moment when he realises that he's just swallowed something solid from the bottom of his bottle. Sticking his tongue out and waggling it as if this will dislodge whatever-the-fuck-it-is, he wonders what he's doing sitting in this grease-hole.

Not, of course, that scowling teenage waitresses and dirty cutlery aren't without charm. And even though his expensive jacket is starting to stick to the wobbly table. And the nicotine stains on the wallpaper is starting to make it peel to reveal an even more stained wall. It's not a particularly nice place to be, but it's where they meet every Saturday.

He supposes that it started just out of Hogwarts. Sirius and James were planning to live together in London while Peter was going to share a small cottage in the north of Scotland with his long-term Ravenclaw girlfriend Sasha. Sirius often jokes that she shouldn't be in Ravenclaw if she was going to live with Wormtail, but he never says it to Peter's face.

Remus was... Remus was... Nobody really knew what Remus was going to do. Even Sirius (with whom Remus had formed a very close bond with in the last few months of school but then severed it in the days following graduation) didn't know anything of Remus's plans.

But then, Remus always could be a right secretive bugger when he wanted to be. Sirius doubts that it's all down to the werewolf thing. It's probably just Remus himself. He doesn't tell people where he's going or what he's going to do when he gets there. He just disappears and reappears a few minutes, hours or days later with a smile and an 'I picked this up for you' but not even that sometimes.

It doesn't bother Sirius that much. Most of the time. But he just misses seeing Remus everyday and knowing that when Remus left the room, he was only going to the library to research the mating habits of flobberworms for a project in Care of Magical Creatures. He liked knowing the details of life that make it what it is. Now, Sirius only knows if Remus is alive or not with these Saturday meetings.

They started the tradition after celebrating James's birthday in Lily's flat in the posher end of Fulham. They had danced all night to Manfred Mann records, drunk on cheap wine from the corner shop. James and Lily had sat on the sofa while Peter stroked Sasha's hair as they sat on the floor. Remus and Sirius sat opposite each other at Lily's sturdy table just behind the lovebirds on the sofa.

'I never see you anymore Remus.' Sirius had commented, aiming for a light tone but falling closer to drunken annoyance. 'Don't say anything about me seeing you now, it doesn't count if it's a birthday thing.' Remus had huffed and smiled gently.

'I told you we'd float apart after school.' He whispered as he cradling his second glass of wine as Sirius knocked back his seventh.  
'Floating makes it sound involuntary. Your avoidance is slightly more hurtful.' Sirius was amazed at his vocabulary and coherency at this stage of inebriation.

Remus smiled again, slightly more angrily than before. 'Maybe we should have a weekly debriefing so you know exactly what I've done that week.'

So Sirius agreed and a tradition was born.

Sirius asks Kate-the-scowly-teenager for another Cola. He muses that it's not that he wants to keep tabs on Remus, more that he misses spending time with him. They used to spend so much time together at school, no matter what the hierarchy of their little group happened to be. Sirius just misses Remus.

So when he sees him, red-cheeked and shivering from the wind in the High Street just outside, he suddenly doesn't mind that his new jacket is very firmly stuck to the table.

**A/N: Fulham is a place in London for all your non-Londoners who're reading this. **


End file.
